Thursday, November 29, 2012

Google Inc(NASDAQ:GOOG) Webmaster Tools helps owners of websites
to manage how their site comes up in Google. It also helps in diagnosing
problems and optimizing traffic. Unfortunately, the site is facing a grave
security breach.

Search
Engine Journal said that the
issue is that old accounts are being verified again. This may not sound like a
big deal, but it is a potential catastrophe for an individual, who has search
engine optimizers working on their websites.

David Naylor has mentioned on his blog that apparently he had
access to every old account that belonged to a previous clients or a site that
had approached his company for some short-term consultancy.

It is being hoped that no black hats are exploiting special
access to sites belonging to previous clients, as that could lead to
considerable damage of uploading fake sitemaps, reconfiguring of the US-based
websites to target internet users in Kazakhstan, requests for deletion of
important URLs from Google’s index and setting up of Google’s rate of crawl at
a absurdly slow pace.

A former SEO director at eBay, Dennis Goedegebuure confirmed to
The Next Web that he had been given access to the webmaster tools of eBay.
Although he had left the company nearly a year and half back.

The glitch goes to the extent of granting access to the Google
Analytics of the websites too. At least, it is so in some cases. It goes
without saying that the glitch is giving access to people to extremely
sensitive information that sites and companies would not want former workers or
consultants to see or share.

Google has not yet commented on the matter.

People, who are yet to realize the gravity of this apparent
breach of security, contractors, ex-employees, people having access to a site
at some point of time in the past, may probably gain access once again to
Webmaster tools, and Google Analytics too.